you can also use box select.
Or hit tab when you are in face select mode to be able to select vertices by linked (‘L’ key), with box or circle select (‘B’ key), by group (from the edit buttons), or by material (also edit buttons).
When you return to face select mode, those faces will be selected.

Yep, the many ways of going about your business in blender. One of the coolest thing is you can always find another way to accomplish the same task if you try hard enough. Take the thread a while back on making a single vertex mesh, that was interesting.

Just do this: go into face mode for the sphere, and then push a for select all/deselect all. then hit the add button in the face buttons, and hten hit copy drawmode. you don’t have to hold shift to select every single one.